Visual Message Waiting Indicator

[Alwys2stepsahead]

It would be nice to be able to program a button on IP phones and BB24's as a virtual voice mail box presence.

This key should be programmable to any VM box and light up when new messages are present. This would be very useful to admin assistants that need to monitor executives' voice mail as well as for Workgroup and Mailbox only extensions. I know that you can assign a key to monitor a mailbox only extension but there is no light associated with that and it only works on a phone not BB24s.

A continuation of this thought would be to program the key, upon key press to act just like the Voicemail key and bring you to VM login referencing that specific mail box so that all the user needs to do is enter the VM password.

Any thoughts?

[Palitto Consulting]

Burn an extension license by making an extension-only user. Configure the mailbox escalation options to ring that user every minute for every new message 200 times. Monitor that extension.
This is not perfect in that the button only blinks for 20 seconds out of every minute, but if you want me to dig deeper, I could probably find that delay and up it to 59 seconds. Also, it messes with using escalation options for other purposes.

[Alwys2stepsahead]

Nope, not at all perfect considering it would only work for 200 minutes but an ok work around for partial functionality.

How receptive is Shoretel to feature requests? Do they even check these boards?

[59Deano]

Have you tried the 'auto-copy' message feature for the Admin Assistant scenario?

[blanning]

I have played with several work-arounds for this scenario (it also comes up when an operator has their own mailbox that is separate from the general delivery mailbox for the company) and the point is not can you make a work- around, but rather that this a pretty simple feature that ShoreTel should add. ShoreTel is a great product, but they need to catch up on some of these basic features if they want to compete with competitors.

[sergeant_kyle]

I need this feature for our system as well. However, we have the IP115s spread throughout our labs as dummy phones(extension only) and each lab is then a work group and the workgroup has the voicemail box assigned to it. If there was a way to set that up so that when the workgroup has a voicemail, it lights the message indicator on all phones in that workgroup. And then when you press the voicemail button on any one of those phones, it would automatically know that you wanted to access the workgroup voicemail box. Maybe call it Voice Mail Box Sharing for Workgroups or something of that nature. That would also be set up under the Workgroup section of Director.

[ccm399]

I need this feature for our system as well. However, we have the IP115s spread throughout our labs as dummy phones(extension only) and each lab is then a work group and the workgroup has the voicemail box assigned to it. If there was a way to set that up so that when the workgroup has a voicemail, it lights the message indicator on all phones in that workgroup. And then when you press the voicemail button on any one of those phones, it would automatically know that you wanted to access the workgroup voicemail box. Maybe call it Voice Mail Box Sharing for Workgroups or something of that nature. That would also be set up under the Workgroup section of Director.

Are there PC's by the phones?

[Palitto Consulting]

I need this feature for our system as well.

Chris is about to recommend a way to do it via PCM. If you don't want to do it via PCM:

Except for configuring through Director, we can implement this fairly easily via a custom. If you're interested in a quote, PM or email me your contact information.

[scooper2]

I tried the fix of creating the monitoring button on the phones for the members of the work group. Its not perfect but it does what they wanted with a visual button on the phone to notify them of the voicemail.

[dpovlick]

You could create a transer to mailbox or dial mailbox button on the phones where you want the mailbox button to light. When that mailbox has a message the button will light up. You cannot press the button to retrieve the message. Try it with each key as the results will be different and one may be better than the other depending on how you want to use the feature. The one drawback is if this is an extension and mailbox rather than just a mailbox when they are using the phone the light will also light up.

[PhoneGuy1108]

Another option is to have the mailbox for the user or line that is being monitored generate an email when there is a new message to check - again, not idea, but we do this in environments where we have more than one person responsible for checking "general mailboxes". We setup an email distribution group in Active Directory for our Excahgne server and then have ShoreTel send an email to that address. Anyone we want to receive the email message we just add to the AD distro group.

[jmccumber]

We ran into a problem by forwarding the message to multiple users at the same time. When one person checks the message and replies or handles the issue, it still appears in all the other mailboxes so there is potential for creating double work. If it were a true indicator it would turn off when someone checked the mail box.

[jingram]

Well we are sort of doing this... we can't check voicemail this way, but we are notified when a hunt group mailbox has VM and the inicator light is active. You do have to do it on each user you want to monitor the specific mailbox, but basically what we did was program IP Phone Buttons.

We set up buttons like so:

Function: Telephony
Option: Transfer To Mailbox

Give it an accurate Label

Pointed it to the right extension:

This works really well for the scenario I mentioned above. You still need to access those voicemail accounts specifically in order to check them as they are seperate from your local account and we have found no way to make the button actually ring up the VM for that hunt group, bit it is an indicator of when voicemail is setting in those boxes and that worked well enough for us.

[Flipmstr2]

The dial mailbox does not light up on a 230 phone. Only puts a little tape symbol.

Virtual MB key would be ideal...Lights up when message, push to login to the box.

Yes I have wanted this for a long time now.

additionally, I would love to utilize the hard keyto transfer a call to someones mailbox....Transfer VoiceMail dial number.

[jingram]

Sorry to raise a dead thread, but is there any way to do this now on newer builds like 14.2 or has Shoretel never addressed this?